Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, a small resort town in the Caucasus mountain range on December 11, 1918, six months after the death of his father in a hunting accident. Shortly afterward, Solzhenitsyn's mother moved to Rostov-na-Donu, a city some 600 miles south of Moscow. Life was extremely difficult there; the young mother and son had to live in thatched huts and, at one time, even in a stable.
Solzhenitsyn attended school there, and in 1938, he entered Rostov University as a student of mathematics and physics. He claims that he chose these fields of study only because of the financial security which they would provide him, but that even at this time, literature was the greatest attraction in his life, a fact that was recognized by his teachers. Thus, he enrolled in a correspondence course in literature from the University of Moscow and even tried to get a role on stage as an actor while pursuing his science studies.
Following his marriage in 1940 and his graduation in 1941, he joined the Red Army immediately after Nazi Germany's invasion of Russia and became an artillery officer. He was promoted to captain in the Battle of Leningrad, but was arrested in February of 1945 for veiled but unmistakable criticism of Stalin in some letters to a friend, in which he alluded to the dictator as "Whiskers," the same allusion used in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
When he was only twenty-seven, Solzhenitsyn was thrown into prison because of "counterrevolutionary activity" and was sentenced to eight years of forced labor and exile by one of Stalin's infamous troikas, courts consisting of three military judges. After first serving in a correctional labor camp and then in a prison research institute near Moscow, the author was finally sent to a special camp in the mining region of Kazakhstan, because, as he claims, he would not make moral compromises with the secret police. It was there, in Siberia, that he conceived of the idea of writing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; like the hero of the novel, Solzhenitsyn had to wear his prison number stamped on the areas of the forehead of his cap, as well as on the heart, the knees, and the back of his uniform.
